You might be happier if you stop chasing confidence, according to new research

“Be more confident” is the most recycled life advice on the internet. But recent findings suggest confidence—especially when pursued for its own sake—can backfire.

A 2024 feature in Harvard Business Review reported that strong passion often inflates overconfidence about our performance, nudging people toward riskier choices and blind spots.

The authors’ takeaway wasn’t to kill passion — it was to offset the bias with calibration and feedback, because inflated confidence didn’t reliably translate to better outcomes—or better moods.

Around the same time, the UK Behavioural Insights Team released a national working paper showing the public is broadly overconfident, with older cohorts particularly prone to being “wrong but sure.”

When you put those two together, a picture emerges: confidence feels good in the moment, but the overconfident variant can mislead decisions and erode well-being over time. 

The deeper problem: the costly pursuit of self-esteem

Psychologists have warned about this dynamic for two decades.

In a landmark review, researchers coined a memorable phrase—the costly pursuit of self-esteem—to describe how chasing evaluative highs can create anxiety, defensiveness, and yo-yo moods.

It’s not that feeling good about yourself is bad — it’s that tying your self-worth to constant signals of “I’m winning” can make you fragile.

You swing up with praise, down with setbacks, and start organizing life around proving rather than learning. Long-term happiness struggles in that climate.

What actually helps: self-compassion outperforms confidence boosts

If pumping yourself up isn’t the answer, what is?

A new quasi-randomized trial compared Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) with the gold-standard Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and a control group over a full year of practice.

MSC—training people to respond to mistakes with kindness, common humanity, and balanced awareness—showed durable gains on well-being and psychological symptoms.

The effect wasn’t about getting “hyped” — it was about how you relate to yourself when you fall short.

That echoes earlier syntheses from Kristin Neff that I often cite in my own research: self-compassion delivers many of the emotional benefits people chase through confidence (resilience, motivation), without the defensive side-effects (self-enhancement, denial) that often accompany self-esteem boosting.

In short, how you treat yourself beats how loudly you rate yourself.

Why this matters for happiness, not just performance

Confidence surges can feel great yet prove brittle. Calibration and compassion, by contrast, compound.

Calibrated people seek disconfirming feedback, choose appropriately challenging goals, and recover faster from misses—behaviors tied to steadier affect across months and years.

As my study on self-isolated individuals showed, self-compassion reduces rumination after setbacks, which lowers the emotional “tax” of daily life.

Together, they create a climate where satisfaction arises from doing and learning, not from guarding an image.

That’s a better foundation for long-term happiness than chasing a permanent high.

A 3-part playbook the data support

1) Trade “confidence spikes” for calibration loops.

Before a big pitch or exam, write down your predicted score or outcome—then compare with reality afterward. Over a few cycles, people typically shrink the gap between what they expect and what happens, reducing bad surprises (and the stress they cause). HBR’s caution on passion-driven overconfidence points to the same fix: build objective checkpoints into your workflow. 

2) Swap self-esteem boosts for self-compassion reps.

Use a brief MSC practice after mistakes:

(a) name the moment (“This is hard”)

(b) note common humanity (“Others struggle too”)

(c) offer yourself a supportive line you’d say to a friend.

The 2025 trial that I mentioned above suggests these tiny interventions persist, because they alter response style, not just mood.

3) Anchor worth to values, not winning.

Crocker & Park’s review (2004) shows the trap of contingent self-worth. Re-spec your goals toward process and contribution (“ship the draft,” “help a teammate unblock”) rather than image (“look impressive”).

Over time, values-anchored striving stabilizes affect because progress is under your control. 

Where confidence still belongs (and how to keep it safe)

Confidence isn’t the villain; untethered confidence is. Keep it in its lane:

• Pair confidence with forecasts. If you feel certain, write the number. Good forecasters are modest by design — they revise. The UK calibration paper is a reminder that certainty is a feeling, not a metric. 

• Make it domain-specific. Confidence tied to skills you practice is safer than global “I’m a winner” scripts. You can grow skills; you can’t permanently secure status.

• Prefer compassion after misses. Post-mortems sting less—and teach more—when you’re not busy protecting a confident self-story. That’s exactly where MSC outperforms pep-talks.

Wider impact: what organizations and schools can do

If you’ve been chasing confidence like a mood supplement, psychology is offering a friendlier route to long-run happiness: calibrate what you believe and care for yourself when you miss.

Confidence will still show up — only now it’s earned, quieter, and easier to live with.

The confidence-first playbook dominates hiring and education (“sell yourself,” “project certainty”). The research above suggests a tweak: hire for calibration (ask candidates to estimate their accuracy and show how they update), coach for self-compassion (normalize miss-and-learn rituals), and reward process quality alongside outcomes.

In classrooms, de-emphasize rank battles that make self-worth contingent and teach error-recovery skills as a graded competency.

A culture of calibrated, compassionate performers burns out less and learns faster.